The Queen and the Soldier

The soldier
came knocking upon the queen's doorHe said, "I am not
fighting for you any more"The queen knew she'd seen his
face someplace beforeAnd slowly she let him inside.

"The Queen and the Soldier," by Suzanne
Vega

To paraphrase the inimitable Suzy
V: America has swallowed a secret burning thread, it cuts us
inside and often we've bled. With the release of a defense
memo from March of 2002 as part of the "Downing Street
Memos," it is clear that the desire to remove Saddam's
despotism was used as the lever to pursue an ill-conceived,
ill-advised and ill-considered strategy of "regime change"
that was destined to place in charge a government that was
led either by a "Sunni strong man" or a representative
government loaded with "Western stooges."

The memos smash
the final bricks of the wall of excuses that has separated
people from the truth about why Iraq was invaded. Iraq was
invaded because Saddam was an irritant, and both Bush and
Blair felt that they had a free hand. In pursuit of this, a
PR campaign was manufactured to underline that the war was
about how atrocious Saddam was, and to create out of whole
cloth a WMD threat that did not exist.

That these were
excuses can be seen from the memos themselves: there is not
one word on how to use international law to remove Saddam.
There is not one word on how to deal with the
reconstruction, merely a hope for Blair to ask Bush for
"answers." The entirety of the planning consisted of
planning to go to war, agreeing to manufacture excuses for
war, and creating a cloak needed to launch the war. While
there were earnest genuflections made in the direction of
improving the humanitarian situation, the "Iraq Options
Memo" makes it clear that the troubles in Iraq were viewed
primarily for their PR value.

It should be clear that who
is to act is as important as the action. While it was
possible in some hypothetical world, with some hypothetical
American President, and some hypothetical British Prime
Minister, with some hypothetical public, to have replaced
Saddam in a way that would have led to fulfillment of the
"rosy" predictions and a stronger UN Security Council - the
memos make clear that that hypothetical world is not the one
we live in, that that hypothetical President was not in
power in March of 2002.

The contrast between that world
and this one is made manifestly clear by the language and
steps proposed in the Iraq Options Memo. A lawful removal of
Saddam would have rested on securing a War Crimes or Crimes
Against Humanity indictment, securing a Rule 61 hearing from
the United Nations Security Council to make that indictment
binding on member states, and a plan for nation building.
The possibility of doing this was not even on the radar - it
wasn't even thought of. Assassination was, but not arrest.
Legality was not an option.

Those who are against all wars
at any time needed no convincing, and those who looked
carefully at the military and geopolitical situation knew
that Iraq was a gross blunder of strategy. But a large
number of people convinced themselves that because Saddam
ruled over an atrocious police state, they therefore did not
need to consider who was being given a blank check to
rewrite the rules of diplomacy and legitimacy.

It is a
failure that will hammer upon us. It is not only what, but
who and how, that must be answered, even from the hardest of
hard perspectives. The humanitarian argument is only a
legitimate one, if humanitarianism motivates those who will
carry it out. For those who believe that the military
instrument can be used to produce desirable outcomes, such
as removing dictatorial regimes, there is a burden of proof,
namely that those ends are attainable in fact, and not
merely desired in fantasy.

He said,
"I've watched your palace up here on the hillAnd I've
wondered who's the woman for whom we all killBut I am
leaving tomorrow and you can do what you willOnly first
I am asking you why."

The wide gap
between the cause that people are told they will fight for,
and that which they are actually fighting for, has often
been very wide indeed. Iraq is an example where the stated
causes and the actual causes are at such variance that it is
not difficult to see why the rosy picture painted before the
invasion has not occurred. The British were hoping for an
Iraq that was reintegrated into the international order,
without WMD. Even the memo writer of Iraq options admitted
that these two goals were contradictory: a representative
Iraq, caught between a hostile and WMD-armed Iran, and an
inimical and WMD-armed Israel might well seek WMD. As might
any other "end state" government in Iraq. The goals of
representative government, international integration and WMD
negative status fail in Iran, which is not fully integrated,
has WMD, but does have a regime which is at least nominally
representative. Why should a different outcome in Iraq have
been expected? The goals of representative, WMD-negative,
and integrated into the international order fail with
respect to Pakistan, why should a representative Iraq have
less desire to secure itself than
Pakistan?

The young queen, she fixed
him with an arrogant eyeShe said, "You won't understand,
and you may as well not
try"

Instead of being forthcoming
about the goals and objectives of Iraq and allowing the
public to decide, they hit upon a different plan: an
elaborate charade was to be concocted, one that was
misleading even if one believed that Saddam's regime was
"dirty." The WMD threat was merely an excuse, because the
threat was no different in 2002 than it had been for some
time. Treating the public like children who did not have the
right to know what was being decided and why, Tony Blair's
advisors focused only on how to get public acceptance for a
policy already decided on for other reasons. The reality is
that even the British were deceived, and their memos show
it. A legitimate attempt to overthrow Saddam, prevent his
using WMD in a last ditch attempt to preserve his regime,
and replace him with a representative government would have
required more troops, more bombing in advance, and more
investment lined up for the post-war situation than the war
planning contemplated. In the end, the government of Tony
Blair conceded on every single caveat that even their hawks
wanted. The most painful conclusion of the released Downing
Street Memos is not that the war was a sham, nor that it was
manufactured by excuses and distortions - the proof for
these was evident - but that one must believe that the
government of the UK was willing to abandon every principle
of statecraft that it enunciated in its own memos. Either
there was a complete and reckless willingness to follow the
US regardless - with fewer troops, a smaller coalition, no
nation building strategy, and no clear end state - or one
must conclude that over the months of planning the Blair
government found out that the regime of Saddam Hussein was
less well armed than they had supposed, and therefore even
further from being a threat, and closer to being toppled by
other means.

In the end, it was the people who thought
themselves sensible who consented to this war, and it is
against the standard of being sensible that the war policy
must be judged. From the sensible views of a hawkish
insider, two points become clear. First, any thoughts of
real Democracy or improvement in Iraq were subsidiary to the
objective of getting Iraq's oil on-line again - because that
is what "being a member of the international community"
means in practice here. Second, the sensible requirements of
policy were not implemented, even from the point of view of
those absolutely committed to them. Failure was not only an
option, it was, under such circumstances, an inevitability.
The ways of power politics might be strange, but they are
not this strange.

Let us hope that some day, future
historians do not read the song as a complete parable for
our own age, with the Queen being America, and the soldier
being all of us. But we have already reached the point of
heartache, and there are not many lines left to be
written.

Stirling Newberry is an internet business and
strategy consultant, with experience in international
telecom, consumer marketing, e-commerce and forensic
database analysis. He has acted as an advisor to Democratic
political campaigns and organizations and is the the
co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, Jay Rosen and Matt
Stoller, of BopNews, as well as being the military
affairs editor of The Agonist.

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